Tuesday, February 28, 2017

This is a great speech, isn't it? But in America, no president would ever be elected who could give it, even if he believed every bit of it.

Of course, we've actually got a president who doesn't believe any of it. Now, thanks to 90 million Americans who couldn't even be bothered to vote, we've got the worst president in U.S. history, a president whose speeches are just the reverse of this one.

As Seth Andrews demonstrates, we've still got good people in America. But we've got an uphill struggle now.

Monday, February 27, 2017

One of the ways in which John Oliver distinguishes himself from the competition is in taking the time for an in-depth look at issues like this.

It's still less than 20 minutes, but that's a lot for a single video clip. He doesn't even break up these videos into smaller pieces in order to get more ad revenue!

I should note that I've had a Health Savings Account for years. They're worthless. They're exactly the wrong way to get health care. And Oliver mentioned some of the reasons why.

But there's another reason. Health Savings Accounts discourage you from getting health care, because you are paying for every doctors visit. Now, sure, that keeps you from getting medical care for every little thing, but it also encourages you to delay long enough for a minor condition to become a major one.

Ordinary health insurance - including what you get in 'Obamacare' plans - has co-pay requirements, so that you won't go to the doctor every other day, just because of the cute receptionist. But they don't encourage you to say away from doctors entirely.

And health insurance isn't expensive because of too many doctors visits. It's expensive because of cancer, heart disease, and other extremely costly conditions, often near the end of your life, which modern medical care can treat these days.

For lower cost and better outcomes, we'd be better off encouraging more doctors visits in the hope of catching these conditions early. Health Savings Accounts encourage just the reverse, unless you're wealthy enough that the cost of health care doesn't really matter at all to you.

Health Savings Accounts might be the absolute worst way to manage health care. Indeed, they might be worse than having no health care plan at all, since the rich use them to avoid paying taxes. And despite what Republicans tell you, we do need taxes.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

This is a difficult article to read. It's another inquiry into child sexual abuse, this time of the 150,000 children sent abroad from the UK after World War II.

Those children weren't all abused, and not all of the perpetrators were from religious institutions. But many were. And the stories are horrendous!

For example, there's this one from Clifford Walsh:

He is now 72. Fremantle is where, in 1954, aged nine, he stepped off the ship from London, looking for the sheep he'd been told outnumbered people in Australia 100 to one.

He ended up at a place called Bindoon.

The Catholic institution known at one point as Bindoon Boys Town is now notorious. Based around an imposing stone mansion in the Australian countryside, 49 miles north of Perth, are buildings Walsh and his fellow child migrants were forced to build, barefoot, starting work the day after they arrived.

The Christian Brothers ruled the place with the aim of upholding order and a moral code. Within two days of arriving he says he received his first punishment at the hands of one of the brothers.

"He punched us, he kicked us, smashed us in the face, back-handed us and everything, and he then sat us on his knee to tell us that he doesn't like to hurt children, but we had been bad boys.

"I was sobbing uncontrollably for hours."

His story is deeply distressing. He tells it with a particularly Australian directness. He is furious.

He describes one brother luring him into his room with the promise he could have some sweet molasses - normally fed, not to the boys, but the cows. The man sexually abused him.

He claims another brother raped him, and a third beat him mercilessly after falsely accusing him of having sex with another boy.

"We had no parents, we had no relatives, there was nowhere we could go, these brothers - these paedophiles - must have thought they were in hog heaven."

He has accused the brothers at the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the first time he has fully disclosed his experiences.

At the time he says: "I was too terrified to report the abuse. I knew no other life.

"I've lived 60 odd years with this hate, I can't have a normal sexual relationship because I don't like to hold people," says Walsh. "My own wife, I couldn't hug."

He was troubled by all the memories.

"I couldn't show any affection. Stuff like that only reminded me of what the brothers would do all the time."

Bindoon is now a Catholic College. Again, not every person who raped children was a priest. And not every priest rapes children - far from it. But these are people who get respect just because of who they are.

Churches expect - and almost always get - our automatic respect. They claim to be our moral leaders, and nearly everyone seems to go along with that. Certainly, the news media and our politicians do. The religious section of my local newspaper is titled "Faith and Values." Church leaders regularly claim that 'you can't be moral without God.'

And yet:

The Australian Royal Commission recently estimated that 7% of the country's Catholic priests were involved in child abuse.

And such is the scope of sexual abuse allegations in the Catholic and Anglican churches in the UK that entire strands of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse are dedicated to them.

This story is horrific for many different reasons, and it wasn't just the churches who let such things happen to children, but the British government, too. Child rape is vile no matter who does it. I don't mean to imply otherwise.

But religious groups are different, because they claim to have the high ground. They claim to be our moral leaders. They claim to have an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving deity on their side. Well, where was he when children were being raped by his own priests?

The Catholic Church, in particular, tells us that contraception is immoral, that abortion is immoral, that homosexuality is immoral. Well, why should we listen to anything they say, when priests were not only raping children, but the church was helping them by covering it up and moving those priests to new, unsuspecting parishes where they could find fresh victims?

Of course, it's not just the Catholics, and it's not just Christian churches. But it's Christian churches here, in English-speaking parts of the world. And the Catholics have a rigid hierarchy that many Protestant denominations don't have (especially the smaller sects). With power comes responsibility.

And again, if you really do have an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving deity on your side, where the fuck was he? Your god would not be worth my worship even if he did exist. (Of course, if you've ever bothered to read your own Bible, you'd already know that.)

It is long past the time when we should have stopped giving churches and church leaders our automatic respect. If you want our respect, earn it.

It is long past the time when we should have stopped accepting the claims of religious leaders about morality. They know no more about morality than the rest of us, and many of them have demonstrated that they know far less.

It is long past the time when we should have stopped accepting all of their claims, without good evidence first backing up those claims. If child rape won't open our eyes, what will?

Friday, February 24, 2017

Is this jailing and killing reporters? No, of course not. Not yet, at least. But this is how fascism comes to a country, one small step at a time.

If we don't object - loudly, vociferously, determinedly - there will be another step. And then another. And another.

***Note: I just finished reading The Fugitive by Robert L. Fish, an old (1962) mystery about Nazis trying to reestablish the Reich in Brazil. (It's a good read.)

The first part of the book is set in 1939, when a Nazi party official visits Brazil. He complains about how everyone is against them, he claims that it's all a conspiracy, and he brags that they're going to make Germany great again.

I'm paraphrasing, but that's still what he was saying. It was all anger and resentment and boasting.

I had to put the book down for awhile, because it was almost identical to what we've been hearing from the Trump administration. All you'd have to do is replace "Germany" with "America," and it could have been Donald Trump, word for word. I'm not kidding. I'm not even exaggerating. It was eerie. And frightening.

Later in the book, after World War II, the Nazis want to prohibit Jewish immigration to Brazil. But they know they can't get Brazil to do that directly, so they just try to prohibit immigration from those specific countries where they'd expect Jews to be emigrating.

In effect, their plan is exactly the same as Trump's plan to keep Muslims from immigrating to America. If you just changed "Jew" to "Muslim," it would be identical.

This wasn't a big part of the book - it was just mentioned in passing - but again, it was bizarre. It was like reading Donald Trump's playbook, only coming from a Nazi character in a work of fiction more than a half-century ago.

I know about Godwin's Law and all, but sometimes, it really seems appropriate.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

If you've ever talked to Creationists, you'll know that most of them don't even have a fifth-grade level understanding of evolution. Many don't even know what evolution is. I'm no biologist, but that's been obvious even to me.

And you'll hear from these people lots of different arguments for why evolution is wrong. (Oddly enough - or maybe it's not surprising at all - you never seem to hear an argument for why Creationism is true. They seem to think that disproving evolution would magically make their own beliefs valid. Obviously, it doesn't work like that.)

Still, it's rather shocking to see all of the claims of Creationists on the same web page! I didn't realize there were that many of them. Heh, heh. But I love how the website handles these claims.

Click on a particular claim and you'll go to a page that clearly, and succinctly, describes everything you need to know. First, it repeats the claim and gives a source for the claim (just one source; many of these claims can be found all over the internet).

Then it lists one or more brief responses. These really are brief, and I love that. I should learn from this website! (But I know I won't.) Typically, a response seems to be all you need to know in the shortest version possible.

But after that, there are links and/or references for further research, so if you do need to know more, you can find much longer explanations (often scientific reference materials).

I've had this web page bookmarked for some time, but I don't use it much. (As I say, most arguments by Creationists require only a fifth-grade level understanding of evolution to refute.) However, it's a fascinating page to browse.

Monday, February 20, 2017

The funny thing is that the comments section of this video clip is overrun with pro-Putin trolls claiming that his critics "are all Jews" and otherwise pushing the idea that Putin's Russia is no different from America.

At a different time, in another country, it was effectively a death sentence.

Being branded an "enemy of the people" by the likes of Stalin or Mao brought at best suspicion and stigma, at worst hard labour or death.

Now the chilling phrase - which is at least as old as Emperor Nero, who was called "hostis publicus", enemy of the public, by the Senate in AD 68 - is making something of a comeback.

In November, the UK Daily Mail used its entire front page to brand three judges "enemies of the people" following a legal ruling on the Brexit process.

Then on Friday, President Donald Trump deployed the epithet against mainstream US media outlets that he sees as hostile.

"The FAKE NEWS media (failing New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!" he wrote on Twitter. ...

Steve Silberman, an award-winning writer and journalist, wondered whether the remark would prompt Trump supporters to shoot at journalists.

And that might not be a far-fetched concern. Late last year, a Trump supporter opened fire in a pizza restaurant at the centre of a bizarre conspiracy theory about child abuse.

The US president's use of "enemies of the people" raises unavoidable echoes of some of history's most murderous dictators.

Under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, out-of-favour artists and politicians were designated enemies and many were sent to hard labour camps or killed. Others were stigmatised and denied access to education and employment.

And Chairman Mao, the leader of China who presided over the deaths of millions of people in a famine brought about by his Great Leap Forward, was also known to use the phrase against anyone who opposed him, with terrible consequences. ...

Carl Bernstein, a reporter who helped to bring down Richard Nixon with his reporting on the Watergate scandal, tweeted: "The most dangerous 'enemy of the people' is presidential lying - always. Attacks on press by Donald Trump more treacherous than Nixon's."

Is Donald Trump really that ignorant, that he doesn't realize the historical significance of "enemy of the people"? That's how dictators talk.

Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party want you to get your 'news' directly from him, without anyone pointing out when Trump lies. That's fascist thinking.

Rep. Lamar Smith, from Texas, actually said, "Better to get your news directly from the president. In
fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth." Believe it or not, this is the guy Republicans put in charge of the House Science Committee!

Keep in mind that this is the president who readily repeats lies with the justification that he saw or heard them somewhere. And that's where we Americans are supposed to get "the unvarnished truth"? Really?

We're still less than one month into this pathetic, dangerous excuse for a presidency. How crazy can it get?

Friday, February 17, 2017

I'm not too familiar with Jake Tapper - and not especially fond of CNN in general - but here's another video clip I stumbled upon today. And I have to admit that I'm impressed.

Donald Trump doesn't seem to have intimidated these guys - not yet, at least. Of course, Trump's record low approval ratings might have something to do with that, I don't know. But I'm trying to praise Tapper here, not cast doubts on his motives. Nice job!

Still,... this is Donald Trump, a Republican so crazy that even Fox News calls him out on his lies:

Yes, that's Shep Smith, who's easily the best of the worst at Fox News, but nonetheless, this is unprecedented, isn't it? Have you ever heard Fox News say anything like this about another Republican, let alone a Republican president?

Yesterday, Donald Trump's first solo press conference as president was just crazy piled on top of crazy. As others have said, it was unhinged. It was nonstop whining. And it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

If this didn't scare you about the future of our country, nothing will. And we're not even a month into his presidency yet!

I can't even begin to recount all of the lunacy he displayed here. TPM has posted the 8 Craziest Moments and 5 Overlooked Asides, but even those barely scratch the surface. It was just nuts! SNL will have to devote an entire show to this press conference if they hope to come even close to the insanity of the real thing.

This is one of the best reactions, for its brief length, from Jake Tapper at CNN:

"It was Festivus." Heh, heh. Now, that was funny. But his point was very serious.

"At one point he said that the leaks were real but the news was fake, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever." Tapper is right. If it's fake, it's not a leak.

You can't claim that the intelligence community is leaking classified data while also claiming that news organizations are lying when they report it. Yet that's exactly what Trump has been claiming.

Tapper mentions Peter Alexander at NBC, and the clip below shows that brief segment of the news conference.

Remember, after the election, Donald Trump bragged and bragged about winning one of the biggest electoral college margins in history, while also claiming that he won the popular vote. Neither of those claims was true - not even close!

Recently, he's dialed back the first of those claims, maybe because it was so ludicrously false. But he replaced it with a claim that was just as demonstrably false, that he had the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.

That "304 or 306" stuff is because Trump didn't even get that part right. He's repeatedly claimed that he got 306 electoral votes, when he actually got 304. But that's hardly the main thing here. I mean, at this point, no one is going to expect Donald Trump to get numbers right.

But he claimed, as he has been claiming, that he won the biggest electoral college victory since Reagan. Alexander started to correct him, mentioning one of Barack Obama's wins (both were bigger than Trump's), when Trump interrupted to change that claim to just Republican wins. But even that isn't true, which Alexander noted when he finished his sentence.

"So why should Americans trust you, when you accuse the information they receive as being fake, when you're providing information that's not accurate?" Good question, isn't it?

But like everything else where Donald Trump has been demonstrably wrong, he shrugs it off as just something 'he was given.' "Actually, I've seen that information around." But the point is that it's not true.

We've seen this over and over again, throughout the campaign and right into the presidency. We saw it when he falsely claimed to have seen thousands of American Muslims cheering on 9/11. We saw it when he claimed that he actually won the popular vote, because 3-5 million people voted illegally.

Over and over again, Donald Trump either lies or is just too stupid to separate fantasy from reality. I don't know which it is, but it's scary as hell, either way, given that he's now President of the United States.

PS. Please note that Trump is holding a 2020 campaign rally in Florida tomorrow! Yes, this is an actual campaign rally, paid for by his 2020 presidential campaign, less than one month into his term of office. How crazy is that?

On Feb. 6, Germany's most-read newspaper reported that dozens of Arab men, presumed to be refugees, had rampaged through the city of Frankfurt on New Year's Eve. The men were said to have sexually assaulted women as they went through the streets; the newspaper dubbed them the Fressgass “sex mob,” referring to an upmarket shopping street in the city.

Bild's report sparked widespread concern in Germany. The nation has taken in millions of migrants over the past few years, and there had been reports of a similar incidents in Cologne and other cities the previous New Year's Eve.

But police investigating the crime now say that the allegations included in the article are “without foundation.”

According to the Frankfurter Rundschau, the witnesses who spoke to reporters may be investigated themselves. Bild has now deleted the story from its website. The paper's online editor in chief on Tuesday said that the company apologized “for our own work.”

It's admirable that the newspaper apologized for the false story and deleted it from their website. But that won't undo the damage that it's done - and that it will continue to do.

These kinds of stories never die. They just continue to get passed around by people who don't know that they're false and by people who do know they're false but are fine with deliberately lying to push their ideological agenda.

There have been plenty of false stories about refugees and migrants in Germany over the past few years, in large part a reflection of divisive political views on the issue within the country and the increasingly fragmented world of online media. They include the story of the “Allahu akbar”-chanting mob that set Germany’s oldest church alight (quickly proved false), for example, or the refugee who took a selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel who was accused of terrorism links (again false).

But most of these stories have been driven by social media or spread by ideological websites like Breitbart.

Fox News was bad enough. Now we've got Breitbart. Not only that, Breitbart is in the White House, advising Donald Trump. Breitbart has been given political power at the highest levels of our government. Lying racists have taken control of America.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

This is just a brief video, but IMHO, the subject hasn't received nearly enough attention. Of course, that's not surprising, given all of the other crap going on with Donald Trump.

Still, Republicans complained nonstop about Hillary Clinton's email server. Well, she never in her life did anything this reckless with our national security. And this situation doesn't even have anything to do with Vladimir Putin!

Incidentally, I wonder how much money Trump is making from the presidency? Even during the campaign, he was charging high rates when using his own properties. Now, he's holding events at his own golf club and charging the military rent in his office tower.

We might never get to see his past tax returns, but it would be very interesting to compare them with what he's making now, don't you think? He seems to be using the government as his own piggy bank and the presidency as free advertising.

As bad as I expected a Trump presidency to be, it's been even worse than that. And we're not even a month into it yet!

And we're still speculating about how much Donald Trump and/or his advisors have been working with the Russians to damage America! Imagine that if it were a Democrat, rather than a Republican, in office!

Now that Trump's National Security Advisor has resigned in disgrace, Josh Marshall explains what's really the problem here:

The truth is Michael Flynn does not matter. We have before us a question that has stood before us, centerstage, for something like a year, brazen and shameless and yet too baffling and incredible to believe: Donald Trump's bizarre and unexplained relationship with Russia and its strongman Vladimir Putin.

It is almost beyond imagining that a National Security Advisor could be forced to resign amidst a counter-intelligence investigation into his communications and ties to a foreign adversary. The National Security Advisor is unique in the national security apparatus. He or she is the organizer, synthesizer and conduit to the President for information from all the various agencies and departments with a role in national security. This person must be able to know everything. The power and trust accorded this person are immeasurable. It is only really comparable to the President. And yet, we are talking about the President. A staffer or appointee can be dismissed. The President is the ultimate constitutional officer. ...

...the circumstantial evidence, the unexplained actions, the unheard of spectacle of a foreign power subverting a US election while the beneficiary of the interference aggressively and openly makes the case for the culprit, the refusal to make even the most elementary forms of disclosure which could clarify the President's financial ties - they are so multifaceted and abundant it is almost impossible to believe they are mere random and chance occurrences with no real set of connections behind them. ...

If you were Vladimir Putin you could not have done more to help the cause of Donald Trump. And if you were Trump, you could not have done more in actions and statements to repay the favor. The only question is whether the trajectory of perfectly interlocked actions were simply chance or tacit. Is it even remotely credible that with everything that led up to it, Michael Flynn initiated and conducted this back channel on his own? Hardly. It's crazy that we're having this conversation about a sitting President. But here we are. It's time. We need to know the answer to this question.

And how are Republicans responding? You know, the political party which held seven investigations into Benghazi, none of which found anything they could blame on Hillary Clinton? That same political party which chanted "lock her up" over emails - emails! - supplied to them by Vladimir Putin (dropping the whole thing like a hot potato after the election was over)?

You could probably guess, huh?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on the Flynn affair: "I just don't think it's useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party. We'll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we're spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense."

That was the same mindset – an aversion to accountability in exchange for perceived short-term political gain – that produced an explosion of GOP corruption in the mid-aughts. There's little evidence the party learned from that sordid period, and Trump seems likely to reproduce it, except bigger, more garishly, and with more conspicuous gilding. And his congressional enablers seem ready to help out, if only by omission of real oversight.

The Trump administration itself (I still throw up a little in my mouth whenever I say that phrase) is only concerned about stopping the leaks, stopping the flow of information to our news media, so that the American public just won't hear about this stuff.

And the Republican Party doesn't give a crap about Russian influence in the highest levels of our government, as long as they think it will help them politically.

Given the past 40 years of the Republican Party putting political ambition above their own country, why would we expect any difference now? The only thing they care about is partisan politics. They won't give a crap about Russian meddling in our country unless they see the a political downside from it.

And even then, they're far more likely to try to suppress the news or muddy the waters, rather than see any ugly truths come out. Besides, we just had an election, so this is the absolute worst time for political pressure to have an impact.

We should have cared about this stuff in November. Remember, we did this to ourselves! Putin helped, but he couldn't have done this without our willing participation. That's the problem with a democracy: we get the kind of government we deserve.

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

It's only been a month! Heck, it's been less than a month since Donald Trump took office. We've got another week to go before it will even have been one month,... and we've got at least four years of this stuff ahead of us!

What have we done to ourselves? What has the Republican Party done to us? Can America survive four years of these people?

And that's four years at best. That assumes we pull our heads out of our asses and start voting. Keep in mind that, if you didn't vote for Hillary Clinton in November, this is your fault. But I keep hearing people making excuses for bone-headed idiocy.

We don't need Russia to destroy America, because we're doing it to ourselves.

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

This is several days old, but it's so funny, I kept going back to watch it again. So I thought I'd post it here.

That's Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer, and she nails it, doesn't she? I'm not a big fan of SNL in general, but their political skits have been hilarious. Of course, Trump is a gold mine for political comedians!

Saturday, February 4, 2017

These aren't safe for work, and they might give your elderly relatives a heart attack (unless they're like me, of course), but if you're not easily offended, they're hilarious. I just listened to this one, and it struck me as particularly funny. It's a review of What Would Jesus Do?

I've never tried to embed audioBoom, but if this doesn't work for you, you can download the mp3 file here, or listen to it on iTunes. The later podcasts are available on YouTubehere, but not this one - not yet, at least. (This particular podcast is about a year old. I've been working my way through their archives.)

Actually, that is probably only scratching the surface of where you can get these. But again, if you enjoy this kind of humor, be sure to check out their Scathing Atheist and Skepticrat podcasts, too. (Note that the latter is their newest podcast, and although it started great, they've only released one episode since May. I suspect that two regular podcasts are about all they can handle right now.)

BTW, here's a quote from the beginning of one of their Scathing Atheist podcasts: "Warning: The following podcast contains genuine, heartfelt emotions. But don't worry. We wrap them in profanity." Don't say you weren't warned. :)

Bill Garthright

I'm a skeptic. I think it makes sense to have reasons for what I believe, so I apportion my belief to the evidence. You're welcome to disagree. Please, tell me I'm wrong. I probably don't agree with anyone about everything. Why should disagreement be a problem? Check the Pages section below for series posts and links to book reviews and game posts, as well as contact info. Unfortunately, I rarely blog at all, anymore. So don't expect new posts. - Bill

Followers

Quotes

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. - Robert Wilensky

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong - Richard Feynman

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other. - Sir Francis Bacon

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science. - Hal Clement

No matter how many times a theory meets its tests successfully, there can be no certainty that it will not be overthrown by the next observation. This, then, is a cornerstone of modern natural philosophy. It makes no claim of attaining ultimate truth. In fact, the phrase "ultimate truth" becomes meaningless, because there is no way in which enough observations can be made to make truth certain and, therefore, "ultimate". - Isaac Asimov

The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion. - Treaty of Tripoli, passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams (1797)

I don't doubt the sincerity of dowsers, but even after we've demonstrated that they can't produce results that are any better than chance they'll still go away believing in their abilities... It is like the mother whose son is caught shoplifting on tape. She wonders why someone would want to frame her child by producing a fake video. - James Randi

During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church ... imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. - Mark Twain

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths. - Bertrand Russell

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. - Friedrich Nietzsche

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them. - Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.

This is not about proof. Science does not use proof. We favor evidence, and the work consists largely of the slow accumulation of evidence in support of ideas, not magically potent proofs that establish an idea as unassailable. - PZ Myers

No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. - President Barack Obama

The formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat. - Shekhar Gupta

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. - Sam Harris

To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. - Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in 1553

Democracy is not about majority rule; it is about minority rights. If there is no culture of not simply tolerating minorities, but actually treating them with equal rights, real democracy can't take root. - Thomas L. Friedman

We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason. - Thomas Macauley, 1830

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven into an age of unreason if we dig deep into our history and remember we are not descended from fearful men. - Edward R. Murrow

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best - that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. - Thomas Huxley

There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. ... Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society. - President Thomas Jefferson

To be elected in America, no matter from what party, the candidates have no choice but to year after year pledge to lower taxes further and further. We have become the nation of Ken and Barbie, looking good but very poor at the math. - Rack Jite

Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them. - Steve Eley

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. - President Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle. - Molly Ivins

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. - H. L. Mencken

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. - Winston Churchill